The Porsche, the pay spike and the AI talent race that’s getting absurd

BENGALURU: When Karan Vaidya, co-founder of AI infra startup Composio, promised a Porsche to anyone who referred a product engineer that joined their San Francisco team and stayed three months, it sounded like a stunt. But he wasn’t joking. “Not kidding,” he wrote in the now-viral X post, complete with a photo of a black Porsche model he had in mind.Just hours later, Roy Lee, co-founder of Cluely, another early-stage AI startup, chimed in with his own no-nonsense offer. “I’ll triple your base salary,” he posted, as he searched for a founding designer. “No questions asked.”The timing is uncanny. This same week, Microsoft reportedly poached 24 AI researchers from Google DeepMind, including Amar Subramanya, the former engineering head of the Gemini team, who is now a corporate VP at Microsoft AI. A day later, Meta hired three DeepMind scientists who had helped build a language model that achieved gold medal-level performance in the International Math Olympiad. Meta has also been aggressively staffing its new Superintelligence unit, reportedly offering compensation packages of over $100 million to lure away top researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic.For founders like Vaidya and Lee, who are building AI-native products in public, the job post has become a statement. It’s part recruitment, part performance art and very much a reflection of how fierce the competition for technical talent has become in AI.“There’s a real risk that we’re overpaying for momentum and mistaking it for durability,” said Manav Garg, co-founder and managing partner at Together Fund. “High-visibility compensation moves can bring in mercenaries rather than missionaries. That’s dangerous for early-stage companies where cultural fit and long-term belief in the vision are as critical as technical skill.”Composio recently raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Elevation Capital, Together Fund, and several prominent angels. Cluely, which positions itself as an AI-native workspace tool, raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz. A Porsche, in this context, is relatively modest, starting around $110,000 in the US, it’s a small fraction of what top-tier AI engineers can command in total annual compensation.For many investors, the current frenzy feels inevitable. “Talent is IP,” said Avijeet Alagathi, founder of Shastra VC. “Capital solves for little in this space, so it’s being used to buy and retain talent.”Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan, co-founder at Upekkha, described the market as unforgiving. “In AI, the fourth player doesn’t even matter,” he said. “The people who can orchestrate systems at scale are reaching infinite price.”For now, in a winner-takes-all environment, founders are betting that conviction, like a Porsche, can still turn heads.